Dictatorship

The United States is supposedly a democratic nation - a government of the people, for the people and by the people. But after listening to President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech, it sounded to me as if our country were now headed by a dictator rather than a president, as Mr. Obama kept stating that if he didn't get his way from Congress he would maneuver around it by issuing presidential edicts ( "Obama talks economy, immigration in...

The United States is supposedly a democratic nation - a government of the people, for the people and by the people. But after listening to President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech, it sounded to me as if our country were now headed by a dictator rather than a president, as Mr. Obama kept stating that if he didn't get his way from Congress he would maneuver around it by issuing presidential edicts ( "Obama talks economy, immigration in...

Tunis. -- Some say this is the finest little dictatorship in Africa.Recent events -- the guerrillas of the Palestine Liberation Organization packing their shadowy troubles off with them for Gaza after 12 years in exile, and more than 50 heads of state attending the annual get-together of the Organization of African Unity last month -- have diverted the focus from the backdrop Tunisia provides for such drama.Yet, a farmer planting seedlings on a hillside spits out the words: "There is no democracy here -- you are 500 years ahead of us in America."

I am sorry our founding fathers did not form a parliamentary government ("As tensions rise, Republicans and Democrats focus on debt ceiling," Oct. 7). It would have given us more say in matters affecting us. How sad that our two-party system has turned into a childish, inept, political mess and the executive branch has become a semi-dictatorship. God help us! Joy Shillman, Baltimore

By Scott Shane and Scott Shane,Moscow Bureau of The Sun | December 21, 1990

MOSCOW -- Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, one of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's closest political allies and co-architect of a foreign policy that has changed the world, said yesterday he was resigning because reactionary forces are pushing the country toward dictatorship."

By Will Englund and Will Englund,SUN FOREIGN STAFF | September 5, 1998

MOSCOW -- Criticized for standing pat as Russia embarked on its economic decline, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin tried to turn tough yesterday, vowing to impose an "economic dictatorship" if confirmed as prime minister.Those are the kinds of words that might warm the hearts of the Communists whose votes he desperately needs -- but what he really had in mind for the tumbling Russian economy was a rescue built upon the U.S. dollar.A week ago Chernomyrdin's allies were talking about the need to crank up the printing presses, freeze prices and halt the convertibility of the ruble, a Soviet-style version of economic dictatorship.

BURMA -- or Myanmar, more formally -- makes the Western news pages mostly for its repression of the struggling democracy movement led by Nobel peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is continually harassed and was recently physically attacked while trying to address her followers. But those who dare to take a serious approach to drug eradication are likely to end up in deadlier trouble with the ruling dictatorship, known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, or SLORC, which has incorporated the booming heroin trade into the permanent economy of the country.

LUIS HERRERA CAMPINS, 82 Former president of Venezuela Former Venezuela President Luis Herrera Campins, part of a generation of political leaders who helped end a decade of dictatorship and usher in democracy in 1950s Venezuela, died Friday. A lawyer and a journalist, Mr. Herrera was jailed for four months in 1952 for pro-democracy political activism during the dictatorship of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, and then expelled from the country. He returned from exile in Spain after the dictatorship fell in 1958 and went on to serve as a lawmaker and as president from 1979 to 1984.

It's trick or treat time at the Royal Palace in Madrid.The good thing about a conference opener at which no one shakes hands is that since it couldn't be worse, it can only get better.Lech Walesa is willing to be the whole government in order to lead Poland away from dictatorship.

Just when you think that you have seen, heard, or read everything, you get another surprise. I was flabbergasted when I read that Anne Arundel County Councilman John Grasso is going to run for county executive ("Arundel Councilman Grasso to announce county exec. bid," Nov. 28). If we thought that Mr. Grasso was arrogant before, can you just imagine him as Anne Arundel County executive? We have had enough of this with the current county executive. Anne Arundel County does not need another dictatorship!

Well, that pretty much settles it. My fellow Americans, I have heard and understood the loud and unequivocal message you sent with this year's election: Liberty is for losers. True, we have not been a free people in some time. It's been a long and bumpy road to serfdom - 100 years to be precise, starting in 1913, when government gathered for itself the power to levy a tax on income in direct opposition with the taxation power as the Founders envisioned it. The Founders, after all, understood a thing to two about the dangers of taxation, how necessary expenditures for the public good can all-too-easily become inevitable and bottomless troughs engorging an ever-expanding and ever-ravenous bureaucracy.

Regarding your recent article on the Egyptian presidential elections, Turkey has no claims or aspirations to be a "model" for the Middle East ("Slouching toward democracy," June 27). We are ready to share our experience and provide all possible support if asked, and we wish the Egyptian people the best. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has clearly outlined this when he said Turkey was ready to do its fair share to promote democratization in the Middle East and to facilitate this momentous transformation.

LUIS HERRERA CAMPINS, 82 Former president of Venezuela Former Venezuela President Luis Herrera Campins, part of a generation of political leaders who helped end a decade of dictatorship and usher in democracy in 1950s Venezuela, died Friday. A lawyer and a journalist, Mr. Herrera was jailed for four months in 1952 for pro-democracy political activism during the dictatorship of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, and then expelled from the country. He returned from exile in Spain after the dictatorship fell in 1958 and went on to serve as a lawmaker and as president from 1979 to 1984.

BUENOS AIRES -- A kidnapping or a political stunt? The question is reverberating here in the mysterious case of Luis Gerez, a witness in a human rights trial who was reported missing last month and reappeared two days later, shirtless and apparently in shock, saying he had been kidnapped, tied up, beaten and burned with cigarettes. The case has raised troubling questions in a nation still torn by memories of a brutal military dictatorship that ended almost a quarter-century ago, leaving as many as 30,000 people dead or "disappeared."

NELVA DE FALCONE, 76 Argentine activist Nelva Mendez de Falcone, a pioneering member of an Argentine group that protested disappearances of loved ones during Argentina's "Dirty War," died Monday of a lung problem in La Plata, 30 miles southeast of the capital of Buenos Aires, her family said. She was one of the first members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the famous white-scarved activists who for decades have pressed to learn the fate of their children who vanished during a 1976-83 military dictatorship.

Everyone loves an underdog. Way to go, George!Vote for Perot and foreigners will never take another World Series abroad.China is a communist dictatorship with private capitalism, having economic but not personal rights. No problem. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Falangist Spain, Fascist Portugal, Nationalist China, colonial Hong Kong, royalist Saudi Arabia and nationalist South Africa all managed something similar.Barbie is a slave to fashion. She adores math.

Iraq was a dictatorship and the Soviet Union's client, but now that the Cold War is consigned to the dustbin of history, it is Russia's client.If we would all have septuplets, this country would no longer be scared of China.Soon there will be just two banks on the East Coast: Outer Bank and Inner Bank.Northern High School is what school reform is about, if it is about anything at all.Pub Date: 11/21/97

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - Argentina's Supreme Court overturned two amnesty laws yesterday that prevented the prosecution of hundreds of military officers, soldiers and police linked to the country's "Dirty War," in which thousands of people were killed in the 1970s and 1980s. The ruling paves the way for the revival of hundreds of prosecutions and civil suits that had been dropped for nearly two decades, legal experts and government officials said. Government sources and human rights activists said new charges naming as many as 300 defendants - most of them retired military and police officers - could be filed in the coming weeks.

Fifty-eight years after his inglorious suicide in a Berlin bunker, the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler remains one of history's most challenging topics. How was it that such an unaccomplished, off-putting figure assumed such a magnetic grip over one of Europe's most accomplished and cultured societies? Why did the German people entrust their fate to a messianic megalomaniac who quickly and violently overthrew established public institutions? Why did they stick with him to the catastrophic end?